In my first year teaching, many years ago, I worked at Rutherford High School in New Zealand. One of the subjects I taught was called Humanities – that was a posh name for ‘Social Studies’. I particularly loved the curriculum they had then at Rutherford High. Each unit had about four or five novels (with multiple copies of the titles) linked with it. One unit was on Industrialism and there were some great novels linked with it set in Victorian times showing the impact of this phenomena on society through story. The students were expected to read at least one of the associated novels, more if they wanted to. They kept a reading log and were invited to complete a reading response. I found this way of teaching a particular period or concept in the Humanities curriculum very empowering. The students not only had the opportunity to learn facts, skills and concepts linked with Social sciences they had them come alive in their imaginations as they read story. When I saw the title of this course I immediately though of that curriculum and the success I felt it had for my student’s learning.

Many years later I am working in a school that runs all three programmes of the International Baccalaureate.  The Primary Years Programme which is for children age 3 – 12 is Inquiry based and in my role as librarian I bring literature links to the units of Inquiry as well as Information literacy links. Our students come from a range of cultures and backgrounds and many of them have English as their second language. We use picture books and stories to proved links with curriculum. This often also helps students develop vocabulary and concepts around the unit. An example of this is our students in Prep (age 5) were Inquiry into water. We used the story Rain School by James Rumford to show how rain can be destructive in some communities. The story is set in Chad and the children have to make their school from mud bricks. Their first lessons are how to build the school. They then learn how to read and write over the next few months until the end of the school year. Then the rains come and wash away the entire school building. This really captures their imaginations and we begin to use vocabulary like floods, monsoon, and develop some of the degrees of rain as well, showers, deluge and so on.

I am hoping that this course will enable me to understand the value of literature for children’s learning and develop strategies to help my colleagues at Istanbul International Community school to integrate literature in their curriculum areas.

References

Rumford, J. (2010). Rain School. Retrieved November 16, 2014, from James Rumford website: http://jamesrumford.com/jamesrumford.com/Rain_School.html

Rumford, J. (2010). Rain school. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.